Ashleigh Jones / Contributing Writer
Many students excitedly await the return of Step Sing this year since the last show season was canceled due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Alongside all the anticipation, there has also been a chance for students to reflect on memorable Step Sing experiences in years past.
Jolie Carr, a Samford alumna and former director for Unclassified during the 2020 show season, talked about some of her best memories from rehearsals.
“Problem-solving for me is one of the most fun things,” she said. For her group’s show, “Rise and Shine,” participants dressed as slices of bread and needed a few of their girls’ costumes to look toasted and burnt after they popped out of a prop toaster.
Carr said she had so much fun working with the girls to solve those technical problems.
“We had to try like four different ways during practice,” she said when referring to how they achieved the toasted and burnt costume appearance.
In another recollection, she talked about how the group would start Step Sing practice with a devotional led by different women each time. Carr said it was great to be able to both lead the devotion and listen to the helpful advice from her peers. The devotional time strengthened camaraderie and helped give everyone a chance to reset their focus aside from rehearsals, she said.
Other students shared their own cherished Step Sing memories.
Ryan Condra, a senior and current director for this year’s Dudes-A-Plenty ensemble talked about his favorite part of Step Sing.
“The opportunity to meet people I normally wouldn’t is one of my favorite things for sure,” he said. Condra participated in Dudes-A-Plenty his freshman and sophomore years, allowing him to meet many other students. He added that he met his current roommates through Step Sing.
“It definitely forms a group of people that gets really tightly knit for those three weeks, but then even after Step Sing we still stay in touch, ” he said.
Some of Condra’s best memories of this campus-wide tradition include pretending to be a leprechaun his freshman year.
“It was just so much fun,” he said, adding that he and his colleagues had fun embracing the leprechaun character by cartwheeling, kicking, and hopping around the stage.
“It really didn’t feel like there was any pressure tied to it, we were just ourselves,” he said.
During Condra’s sophomore year, the group did something totally different by choosing to play Greek soldiers embarking on an odyssey in search of their homeland.
“It was a very different vibe,” he said when referring to the show, “but it was still very fun to kind of live both emotions in two different shows.”
Step Sing shows have provided an outlet for students like Condra and Carr to make fond memories. In Condra’s words, “They’re all memorable because they’re fun in their own way.”
